


I Can Hear You

by grandmatabs



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: bringingmyweirdobsessionback, frozen oneshot, givehansaredemptionarc, i'mtrashforthetrashprince
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:07:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22581517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grandmatabs/pseuds/grandmatabs
Summary: “The world is a cruel place,”his brother had told him that when he was eight years old, crying over his other brothers pretending that he didn’t exist.“The world is a cruel place and the sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be. If you try to be soft, it will always hurt when you get stepped on. Make yourself hard and nobody can hurt you.”
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	I Can Hear You

“ _The world is a cruel place_ ,” his brother had told him that when he was eight years old, crying over his other brothers pretending that he didn’t exist. “ _The world is a cruel place and the sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be. If you try to be soft, it will always hurt when you get stepped on. Make yourself hard and nobody can hurt you_.”

Hans had always taken that to heart. To a boy who knew of nothing but backstabbing, bitterness and anger, it had always seemed sound advice. He had built his life on that cornerstone, on the belief that life was pain and he had to be crueler than the next person in order to win. It was only once he had returned home to the Southern Isles, stripped of title, power and dignity, that he began to carefully dismantle that foundation. Brick by brick, piece by piece, he pulled apart the things that he had founded his beliefs on. Lack of emotion, coldness, hardness, those things had given him power. They had put him in the position to be the one stepping.

He wasn’t sure he had liked the feeling. That realization hadn’t come instantly. Rather it had been a tormentor of his mind during the weeks spent in the dank underbelly of the ship on his way home. At first, he had been angry. Angry, bitter, humiliated, afraid. To return to his family after such a failure was worse than death. It was a pit of ever-darkening thoughts that eventually gave way to the reminder that he had allowed things to spiral so far out of control that he had nearly killed someone. It wasn’t the killing, not really. He was a naval officer after all, and it would be far from the first time he had seen death.

Even with that knowledge, he couldn’t shake off the idea that the whole situation had been too twisted. There would have been no joy in it if he had come out on top, a sobering realization that left him with an uncomfortable amount of introspection regarding his own belief system and standards. Still, he had gone round and round in circles for months after returning, demoted to the life of a stable hand, facing (even more) ridicule from his brothers. Unlucky thirteen, yet how much of his bad luck had he brought on himself?

He made excuses for his behavior, laid the blame on everyone but himself, and at the end of each day the guilt on his shoulders never left him. So, he pulled apart his foundation. Some days, it felt as though he was only chipping at it, brushing away dust and crumbs, and other days he took a sledgehammer to it. Once he finally brought it down to nothing but that cornerstone of the world is a cruel place, he broke that too. Then he took the guilt he had been carrying and he made that his new cornerstone. He built on it, to the best of his abilities.

_You are cruel, but maybe the world is not. You are cruel, but perhaps you can change. You are cruel, because your family made you a weapon. You are cruel and you might pretend, but even if a spear is used as a walking stick, it is still a weapon._

Eventually, he learned to add different bricks into the foundation, things less to do with himself. _There is joy to be had in making something with your own hands. Some people do not need riches to be content. Not everyone is trying to step on someone else. There can be beauty in-between the cruel aspects of the world._

He had every reason to be more miserable than ever in his new position in life, but he found something resembling contentment in the simple work. It was an out of place thing, but something he held onto nonetheless. Peace was, after all, a new experience for him. The most surprising thing was possibly the loneliness. Even the other stable workers avoided speaking to him, the disgraced prince. The only people willing to be around him were the children of those workers, the ones who didn’t know any better.

Hans had never spent time around children, as a royal. They were meant to be seen and not heard, and even when he was a child himself, he had been the youngest of his brothers. No siblings to look out for. Any other children were kept out of sight, in a nursery. If his siblings had children, they were watched by a nursemaid. His experience in the stables, with children running underfoot and following the adults around, was a new one. They begged for stories from whoever seemed willing, and while he had ignored them at first, he learned to appreciate the listening ears. When his work was done, he would sit for sometimes hours, telling old stories or making up something new to tell them about. He’d read plenty, back in the days when he’d had access to the library, and most of the knowledge was still stored away in his memory. It was two years before he was willing to tell the story of the coronation though, a special night where every child listened with every fiber of their being.

It softened the adults to him, with time. He made no friends, but they were less likely to give him the cold shoulder, more likely to treat him like an equal in the work. Life wasn’t good, but it was no longer bad. His brothers forgot that he existed and Hans made a life for himself outside of royalty. _Normal_ , he learned, sounded a lot more like _safe_.

Safe. Safe until he heard it.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> For now this is only a oneshot! I have some ideas for a story to go along with it, but I am swamped at the moment, so if people want me to turn it into more of a story, I will probably be slow to the update. Yes, I know, this is the trash prince whom everyone hates, but I hold a soft spot for my trash prince. I think he has a lot of story potential and he deserves a redemption arc!


End file.
